It is becoming increasingly popular to send photographs, scanned documents, slide shows, PDF documents and other types of attachments in email messages. Each attachment is provided with a filename and is linked to an email message in a manner that is well known in the art. Often, a single email message may contain multiple attachments.
Attachments are generally opened when an email message first arrives and subsequently stored along with the message in a recipient's inbox. At a later time or date, the email message is typically re-opened by the recipient so that attachments may be filed, forwarded and/or deleted, for example. It is unlikely that the recipient will recall the contents of every attachment and since the character length of attachment filenames is limited, it is not always easy to determine the contents of an attachment from its filename. Therefore, it is often necessary for the recipient to re-open every attachment in order to determine its contents. This process can be very time consuming, particularly in the case where an email recipient is searching for a specific attachment.